During the late 1940s, John Cheever worked to an unconventional routine. In the morning he would put on his business suit, leave his apartment, and catch the lift downstairs with any commuters. Then, when they reached the ground floor, he would keep going, down to the basement, where he'd walk to his favourite storage room, strip down to his boxer shorts and spend the morning writing. At noon he put his suit back on and headed back upstairs. Lunch followed, then a leisurely afternoon.

It worked for him. Or rather, it worked for his work. Despite their drudging reputation, fixed routines have proved an indispensable tool to artists of all kinds, from George Sand (who wrote through the night supported by chocolate and tobacco) to David Lynch (who no longer has a daily milkshake but still meditates twice a day). Daily Rituals, a print successor to Mason Currey's Daily Routines blog, is a compendium of these beguiling monotonies, a chance to see what great lives look like when the triumphs, dramas, disruptions and divorces have been all but boiled away. It will fascinate anyone who wonders how a day might best be spent, especially those who have wondered of their artistic heroes, as a baffled Colette once did of George Sand: how the devil did they manage?

What did Truman Capote, Patricia Highsmith and Marcel Proust have in common? They worked in bed, surrounded by a cocoon of food, alcohol and cigarettes. How about Ludwig van Beethoven and Soren Kierkegaard? They were each in their own way amusingly coffee-obsessed, with Beethoven insisting on precisely 60 beans in a cup (often hand-counting them to make sure) and Kierkegaard asking his assistant, each time he delivered his afternoon beverage, to explain the exact reasoning behind that day's choice of cup.

Looking over many of the entries in this book, it is hard not to resolve to create your own rigid routine. I should, you think, be more like Dickens, Voltaire, or Mozart. Then I would achieve more. These were disciplined people, whose schedules would inspire the stern admiration of the hardest-faced middle manager. "No city clerk was ever more methodical or orderly," reflected Dickens's son. "No humdrum, monotonous, conventional task could ever have been discharged with more business-like regularity than he gave to the work of his imagination and fancy." And in spite of his wild reputation, Mozart's early days spent in Vienna were a parade of clockwork obligation, beginning with his hair being done "by 6am" and leading on to two hours of composition, four hours of teaching, lunch, then either concerts or more composition before a trip to see his future wife, Constanze.

The psychologist William James hailed such regimes. He believed in "the effortless custody of automatism", declaring that the more we hand our daily lives over to this benevolent force, "the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work". This is easier said than done. WH Auden lived life according to a relentless timetable ("eating, drinking, writing, shopping, crossword puzzles, even the mailman's arrival – all are timed to the minute") but it didn't come effortlessly. Amphetamines powered his days and sedatives sent him to sleep at the allotted time. Indeed, for every Voltaire spending 20 hours a day at his desk, we meet a Gertrude Stein, who said of her daily stint of just 30 minutes that it "makes a lot of writing year by year". Then there is William James himself. His Daily Rituals entry reveals a hopeless procrastinator, a man whose rants against the indecisive and the disorderly were probably a way of discouraging students from ending up like him.

Routines say much more about us than just the actions they contain. For Philip Larkin they were an attempt to evade the passing of time by "making every day and every year exactly the same". In the case of Stephen King, who writes 2,000 words every morning and describes fiction as a sort of waking dream, the invocation of a writing routine is akin to the stuff you do before you get into bed: "your schedule," he says, "exists in order to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep".

The working methods presented in Daily Rituals are so diverse as to offer no easy formulas (or what are now known as "productivity hacks"). It's a string of lifestyles that are often eccentric, but always human. If we want to emulate Franz Kafka or Jane Austen should we copy their routines or find the routines that are right for us, which is to say the routines that are us? Isaac Asimov had an impressive schedule, but he credited it not to self-discipline but to his father's sweet shop, in which he assisted as a child, which would open at 6am and then not close until 1am. "You're who you are," advises Bernard Malamud. "Not Fitzgerald or Thomas Wolfe."

For most of us, our routines are imposed from the outside. They come from our employer or our family circumstances. They are the structure we rail against, the cage we dream of escaping. But is escape really so simple as just waking up each morning with no plans? Isn't that just as terrifying? Or is freedom simply being able to reinvent your life around the work that you do, if that is also the thing you enjoy. "It's not my work," objects Stephen Jay Gould, quoted in his Daily Rituals entry. "It's my life. It's what I do. It's what I like to do."